No names, no pack drill, no punishment

Strangers in a university club

It’s 1 a.m. and night has long since fallen. It is the witching hour and evil is afoot. And there is no better time than now to reveal the secret that everyone knows and whose name no one dare speak: I have discovered the perfect murder.

I wanted to write that I had devised it, but I didn’t devise it; someone else devised it and I’ve just tumbled to it, and it’s so ingenious that I wanted to tell everyone about it.

The ingredients are fairly specific, but the more ingenious among you will no doubt find some means to make the crime fit the punishment. And the punishment is 200 hours of picking up litter. Now, of course, you could just lob a brick off a motorway bridge and kill a motorist, but that’s no fun, because people may see you and you need to have a fast car or an intimate knowledge of the surroundings; people might ask you, “Excuse me, but could you inform me what you’re doing with that large, cumbersome brick on a motorway bridge?” And “Building a wall” probably won’t wash as a reason. And, to boot, in the end, you’ll never know who you killed, and that’s no fun, now, is it?

Alfred Hitchcock made a film about a perfect murder. It’s called Strangers On A Train and it’s about, unsurprisingly, two strangers who meet on a train, get into conversation and discover that each has someone they’d like to murder. An average conversation on an average commute on British Rail, except none of the victims is the ticket inspector. Neither murderer is acquainted with the other’s victim, so they swap victims to throw investigators off the scent. Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal reprised the plot in a later film called Throw Momma From the Train, and I was rooting for momma the whole way. She taught me the word “sultry”, which induced Danny DeVito to nearly wipe out the wrong victim.

But how is it if you get to murder the victim you intend and it’s actually you that does it, and you’re actually tried for the crime and you actually get 200 hours of picking up litter for wiping another guy off the face of the payroll tax? And the papers are full of the story for four years and you still only get 200 hours of litter-picking? Isn’t that simply fantastic, amazing, unreal, incredible, phantasmagorical? I mean, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang can’t hold a candle to this: a flying car? Pfft! Seen it, done it, got the tee-shirt. And the great thing is, you could even produce tee-shirts and people would buy them, so ingenious is this perfect murder. Chat shows and public appearances … pardon? What?

Just a second, everyone.

… (You’re kidding …)

… (Oh, oh, OOOOOHHHHH! Yes!)

Sorry, I’ve just been informed: there’s no merch. No chat show, no appearances. But, before you stomp off in a huff: that, THAT, ladies and gentlemen: isn’t that just the grapefruit on top of the cake? NO ONE KNOWS WHO YOU ARE. No one. Not anyone. Not nobody. Never, ever. Your entire identity is secret. Like a Swiss … sh! … thing … account, shh.

So, mod. op.: how do you do it?

Well, here we go. Step guide to the perfect murder.

Step 1. Vital: form a club. It doesn’t matter who’s in it, any dumbo will do. In fact, the dumber the better. But you’ll need about twenty, thirty, not too many, not too few. And form a committee. The committee will take all the decisions. You will take no decisions at all. ONLY the committee. That is vital. Because committee decisions are made, but they’re not made by anyone in particular.

Step 2. Your mark — the victim as will be — is approached with an offer he or she cannot refuse. He is better than she. And a racial minority helps. Don’t tell me you don’t want to murder someone who’s a member of a racial minority? You must be able to find someone, surely? The offer is of membership, something like a wine club or dinner club or kinky sex, whatever will entice. You tell him or her that it’s all very exclusive and they’ll need to go through a ritual admission. They’ll understand, it’s just like the Masons, after all. No, it’s not THE Masons, but like that. Divulge a secret handshake to convince them.

Step 3. In December, in the middle of a deserted wood miles from anywhere, you invite your guest to stand for three days in a trench having buckets of water thrown on him, forced to eat odd things and drink fish sauce and whale blubber or kangaroo penises or some other disgusting items (a full list is available on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Back Into the Chat Shows). Keep telling them that they’re within an ace of full, unexpurgated membership, in case they weaken, and, if they do weaken, tell them they can’t leave now, because you have such a lot of omega 3 to ram down their gullet. It really doesn’t matter how awful you are at this stage because here’s the great trick, a huge legal argument that’s waiting to glide your way to litter-picking freedom: when they are about to collapse from utter exhaustion and cold and dehydration, and die before your eyes, you whip them into a taxi and send them to a hospital, where, with any luck, they’ll be dead within an hour. Timing, of course, as always, is everything.

What legal argument? Well, you see, because you send for a taxi, it doesn’t matter how deranged you were in treating them up to that point, because calling a taxi while they’re still alive will get you off any charge of murder, as long as you cry a bit in court and say, “I didn’t mean to, really, guv, I didn’t. Honest.” Really, it will.

And, because 18 of you will be charged, your names will be kept from public view and no one will ever know who you are. Two hundred hours of litter picking and you’re free to do an MBA and a PhD and pass with flying colours.

Eighteen people can kill a man in these circumstances and get 200 hours of litter-picking because they say they’re sorry. No one knows their names and everyone will clap at their passing-out parade. There is one caveat: there is just a chance of some acidic remark on YouTube. But, if you vote the right way, you’ll always have a Justice Minister that will pursue a blogger with more venom than a murderer.

If that’s not the perfect murder, then at least it’s better than Hitchcock. Because Hitchcock’s plan didn’t work, and this one does.